Hey. what's up, everybody? Anton Kraly here, from ecommercelifestyle.com, and welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Lifestyle podcast. My voice is gone already. If I sound a little different, it's because I just did a two-hour long coaching call with my community at Drop Ship Lifestyle. And I want to get a quick message out to you, because you're listening to this podcast, which means you are ready to go and make some money this holiday season as we move into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and pretty much all through the new year.

Before I share the message today, really quickly I did want to ask a favor of you if you've been listening to this podcast, if you've been getting value, if you been enjoying it, I really would appreciate it if you pause this really quickly, went over to iTunes and left a review on iTunes for the podcast. We have like 20 or something right now, and I really want to have 100 of them. And I know we have a lot more listeners than 20, so yeah, I'd really appreciate it. Again, if you're getting value. If you're not, don't worry about it. But if you are, would really appreciate it if you paused this, hopped into iTunes on your phone or on a computer and left your review. So, thank you. And, yeah, let's move forward with this tip, and with how you can get all of the sales this holiday season.

If you've been following our stuff, you know that one thing that we do on our eCommerce stores is focus on expiring coupon codes. And we do this because they increase our conversion rate. As soon as we started testing this back like a decade ago we just noticed an instant increase in our order rate and because 90% plus of our traffic are first-time visitors. This is just been something that we've always done, because, again, it makes more money.

Now we modify sees as the holidays come closer. And we do that because we want to stand out more. And when we do our special offers, we're typically trying to do maybe a little bit better than our competition or at the very least match them. But when we get to the holiday season, we have a lot of people getting creative, some people offering huge money discounts. Yeah, you have to do better basically. You have to do more to earn that sale.

So, a few years ago, probably five-six years ago, we started thinking what can we do to stand out even more from our competition? And what can we do to be sure that when people are comparison shopping around, again, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Years, what can we do to make sure they choose us over everyone else? So what we did was just kind of take a step back and look at what makes people make purchase decisions around this time of year. One of the things is, obviously, things are discounted, so the consumer feels like, "Oh, I'm going to save money." But one of the biggest reasons people are spending money and trying to save money is because they're getting gifts for people for the holidays. So for Christmas, for Hanukkah, for Kwanzaa, whatever it is, people are doing their holiday shopping.

So we thought, okay, most of what we sell is high-end stuff. Right? Not exactly the type of thing you're going to expect to get as a gift, so how can we leverage gifts in our businesses to basically capitalize on this traffic in this buying frenzy? What we decided to do was change our normal expiring coupon codes from being just something like save 10% on all orders, to being save 10% on all orders and get a free iPod. That's what we used to do, we switched things up now. But save 10% on all orders and get a free iPod for all orders over $1500. Okay, so things like that where we're giving people products that are not at all related to what it is we're selling, but we're giving it to them if they choose to buy the thing from us. Because we know that in their head they're thinking somewhere in the back of their head, "What am I going to get my husband, or my wife, or my boyfriend, or my girlfriend, or my kid?

They have this in their head, what are they going to get as gifts. And if we tell them, "Hey, if you buy this $2000, whatever, desk from us we're going to give us this $100 free iPod, then guess who they're going to choose. Are they going to choose us or the competition selling the same desk? They're going to choose us all day. Because, again, we're making their life easier by giving them something they can either re-gift or keep for themselves.

Now, the reason I say we used to do iPods is because they used to have the little iPod Nano and Touch and they were super affordable. So now I think the cheapest one is like 200 bucks so we don't do that anymore. But there's lots of other items that you can do for these giveaways. So really anything that's trending that people want. If it's related to your industry that's great, but honestly it doesn't even have to be. Again, the purpose here isn't to increase what the customer is going to get to use with their order. The goal is to give them something they can either gift to themself or gift to someone else around the holidays. So, the goal should be that, obviously, you're still able to be extremely profitable while giving something with the highest perceived value so that people choose you.

If you're wondering, well, how do you fulfill these orders? If you're selling iPods, you can't drop ship from Apple. And, yeah, that's kind of true, but what we do is just go to the websites and have a virtual assistant place the orders. So if you get 100 orders for 2000 bucks, and you have to order 100 different iPods then someone can go to apple.com, order them and choose your customer's shipping address as the shipping address. Of if it's a different product you offer, that you're giving away, even easier. Just send your supplier a CSV of what they need to ship and get it out.

So, the key to doing this and doing it right, again, is give away something with a high-perceived value. And do it sooner than later because the reason people are going to buy from you is so they can get these things in time for the holidays. That way they can give it to someone as a gift, so this is not going to work mid-December to late-December when there's no chance of you shipping it in time. And where it's going to cause more headaches than success. Hopefully you're one of the people that listens to this podcast as it is published. Hopefully you get this implemented on your own store right away. And hopefully you make a bunch of extra money this holiday season.

So, that's it guys. Again, my voice is gone. Just wanted to share that quickly for everybody out there looking to really cash in on this holiday season. And again, I would really appreciate it if you haven't already if you can leave a review in iTunes for the eCommerce Lifestyle Podcast. Thank you everybody. I'm going to get back to work, keep our promotions going. And I will talk to you all next episode of eCommerce Lifestyle. See you.